20 Feb 2014

Shooting Baskets for Center Parcs

The Center Parcs Family Bloggers' challenge for this month was to invent our very own fun indoor game for all the family to enjoy together. Given the weather over the last few weeks, this challenge could not have come at a more opportune time.For when it is pouring outside, the need to improvise and invent ways and means to keep a boisterous toddler happily entertained indoors becomes even more urgent and pressing.Lisa Brown, the Center Parcs' Games Guru has some very inspiring ideas to help create fun games for all the family to enjoy at home. Her tip to 'screw up some old newspaper and stick it together to make a ball. Decorate it, grab some empty toilet roll holders and make your own indoor ten pin bowling alley', was the one I found best suited to our needs.Board games and puzzles are all good. But something a lot more physical is what is really needed to help a toddler expend all that pent up energy that comes from being confined indoors in miserable weather.So the decision was made to shoot some baskets. We decided to craft our own version of a basketball hoop and to make some very toddler-friendly basketballs that would not wreck the furniture. All we needed were some old newspapers and an empty pot of yogurt.J got to work with his crayons and felt-tip pens to create the perfectly decorated basket. He painted, coloured and squiggled on a sheet of paper and stuck some sticky bits on.

Colour, squiggle and decorate

I glued this beautifully decorated piece of artwork to the outside of the yogurt pot. J then took it upon himself to give the inside of the yogurt pot a makeover too. Apparently, it was far too plain for his liking. So the end result was a marvellously scribbled yogurt pot basket.

A work of art

The end result - the Basket

To make the toddler-safe basketballs, all we did was tear up pieces of old newspaper and scrunch them up. Making these was tremendous fun.

Tearing up newspaper

Scrunching up into balls

All the apparatus assembled, it was time to play. The rules of 'Shooting Baskets' state that you stand a certain predetermined distance behind the basket and then throw the balls in. You try and get in as many as you can.I had a go first, and managed to get one ball in. J had a go next. Here's how he got on.

A toddler can stick with the rules of a game only for so long. J was soon improvising. He kept moving closer and closer and closer to the basket till he was hovering over it. And then dropped the paper balls in.

Moving closer to the basket

Hovering over

Next, he tipped the basket on its side and had another go at throwing some balls in.

Improvising with a tipped over basket

This accomplished, he decided it was time to tidy up. So he gathered all the scrunched up paper balls and stuffed them into the basket.

Tidy-up time

All done!

Only to tip them all over his head!

It's raining paper

He was good enough to tidy up again. He gathered all the paper balls and put them neatly into the basket.

Gathering the paper balls again

And neatly tidying up

Only to tip them over my head!

On my head!

What started off as a game of shooting baskets evolved into a myriad of games with no specific description or purpose. By the end, we were all laughing and giggling and being very boisterous and noisy.It was the most fun we have had in a while.(M is not in any of the pictures as he was manning the camera. But he too shared in the giggles).

This is my entry to the Center Parcs and Tots 100 February challenge. If I’m chosen, I would like to visit Sherwood Forest.

I love games like this that just use everyday items from around the house to create a cheap and exciting activity. Looks like you had lots of fun and your child will also have gained creatively. Fingers crossed for Centre Parcs x